UPDATE 1 – ADDED MEDIA
Introduction
In this multi-part essay (replete with multimedia content), we begin with sheer enjoyment of schlock horror (as well as more serious films), and move on to discuss social, political and spiritual issues as reflected in the cultural mirror provided by film, TV, and literature. (Media files will be added gradually. Please check back for updates.)
We watch scenes from the 1944 horror film Voodoo Man, comparing it to Manos, The Hands of Fate, “The Brain of Morbius,” and “Dr. Tongue’s 3D House of Stewardesses.” Also discussed: But I’m a Cheerleader, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “The Happiness Patrol,” and The Front. We ponder forms of social control driven by nativist stereotypes, including the ‘hypnotized by swamis’ trope. How do such tropes feed into the anti-cult narrative used to justify targeting minority adherents with coercive attempts at behaviour modification?
We’re in for some fun, but also serious film criticism and wide-ranging social commentary. Perhaps what’s needed is a ‘giant brain’ to process all this information! But are giant brains really all they’re cracked up to be? We examine clips from Desk Set, Britannia Hospital, “The Sixth Finger” (an Outer Limits episode), and “The War Machines” (a Doctor Who story). Also discussed: the sci-fi novels Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon) and That Hideous Strength (C. S. Lewis). The latter, published in 1945, contains an early example of deprogramming.
Since actress Louise Fletcher had roles in both Cuckoo’s Nest and Deep Space Nine, this facilitates an easy ‘modulation’ into related subject areas. We’ll discuss the therapeutic disguise of social control, and changing attitudes toward meditation, yoga, and new religious movements, real or fictional.
We’ll travel through the McCarthy Era and the Cold War, examining how Britain’s response to the communist threat differed from America’s. Sources include the films I’m All Right Jack and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. We’ll glimpse America’s pre-McCarthy flirtations with socialism (before it became taboo) via the 1935 film version of Eugene O’Neill’s play Ah, Wilderness!, set in 1906.
Returning to the ‘going native’ trope introduced by Voodoo Man, we’ll discuss the case of Sara Chapman Bull, an American disciple of Swami Vivekananda in the early 1900s who found that her devotion to the Vedanta Society was problematized and medicalized in order to bar her from implementing her last will and testament.
Some of the unifying principles we will uncover are ultra-rationalism, ultra-secularism, and ultra-conformism — including burgeoning beliefs encountered in the 20th century that man must become all brain, or create a giant electronic brain which will be superior by virtue of having no feeling, sensation, or human sensibility; that society must be reshaped to conform to a secular scientific model of the universe; and that individual variations in behavior based on minority spiritual, economic, political or cultural views must be stamped out, both for the good of the individual, and the general welfare of society. By contrast, the author will argue for religious liberty, and the freedom of the individual to construct an identity which he or she finds livable.
Fasten your seatbelts!
Voodoo Man
In my part-time, self-appointed role as political satirist (which may lessen with the exodus of Trump), I often map one thing onto another. Such is the case with Voodoo Man, a film possessing some visually interesting scenes, as well as a certain camp appeal. (It was targeted by Rifftrax a few years back.)
My first take on the film was: In White House basement, FOX docs seek COVID cure. In my fevered brain, the mad doctor is Sebastian Gorka, and the voodoo priest is Rudy Giuliani. The light rays and magic incantations are all part of some White House basement plot led by FOX doctors, who want to come up with their own alternative cure for COVID-19 and bring the dead back to life. (They would have no shortage of subjects!)
You sort of have to squint to superimpose this metaphor over top the actual footage; but even if you can’t quite picture it as a final Trump admin debacle, you may enjoy this rough highlights reel for its visual appeal and campiness:
In viewing the film, I got to thinking about its possible influence on later offerings of the mad-doctor-with-dim-witted-assistant variety, and about the tropes employed. I realized that the ‘hypnosis’ and ‘going native’ tropes are connected to issues like social control, and efforts to forcibly deprogram people who occupy some minority status in society. (More later.)
Despite inhabiting a genre ghetto, schlock horror is a mongrel art form whose directors do study and emulate (or simply rip off) the work of their predecessors. That being the case, I wouldn’t be surprised if Voodoo Man director William Beaudine was an influence on Harold P. Warren, who brought us Manos, The Hands of Fate in 1966. The latter is considered a modern classic, but only in the MST3K version, viewable on Shout! Factory here:
The riff which stayed in my mind forever is “Strong enough for a Manos, but made for a Womanos.” The dim-witted assistant, in this case named Torgo, became a stock character in MST3K host segments, e.g. Torgo delivering pizza. And Torgo does seem to be a descendant of Toby, the dim-witted assistant in Voodoo Man. He, in turn, is a variation on the Igor character whose origins lie with Frankenstein (the film and play versions, not Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel).
Say what you will about Voodoo Man, you never see any slashing, blood, or freshly severed limbs. Whatever it achieves (which isn’t much), it achieves through atmospherics, spooky acting (featuring Bela Lugosi), and some decent noirish cinematography courtesy Marcel Le Picard. By modern horror standards, the women are not that badly treated, their main torture being subjection to whole-tone scales, first by a flute and then by an oboe.
Of those who get zombified, the lead is played by Louise Currie, who had the unusual distinction of living to be 100. (She beat out Wood Moy, the star of Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing, by a year.) At first I mistook Currie for Elizabeth Russell, the semi-homicidal daughter in The Curse of the Cat People, a genuinely fine offering from the same year which was marketed as horror, but is really more of a child’s fantasy, sensitively filmed.
Another point favoring Voodoo Man is that it doesn’t primarily set out to be campy — the kiss of death for hundreds (if not thousands) of modern, low-budget horror films. None of the actors are winking at the audience or playing the horror scenes for laughs. The campiness is largely a function of the passage of time, and the fact that modern audiences have seen way too many mad doctors with dim-witted assistants to take such characters seriously anymore. John Carradine taking the zombies out for walkies has got to be one of the most shameful points in his career. As for his conga playing, Downbeat only gave him two stars.
If it’s possible to successfully balance serious intent with campy humour, the best example in the subgenre may be “The Brain of Morbius,” a Doctor Who story from 1976. A restored HD version has been airing on the free (but interruption-laden) Pluto.TV channel Doctor Who Classic. Companion Elizabeth Sladen does a fantastic job of selling the horror aspect, but she and Fourth Doctor Tom Baker manage to slip in some marvelous wisecracks concerning the Frankensteinian creation which emerges as the story unfolds — calling him ‘Mr Allsorts,’ ‘Potpourri,’ ‘Chop Suey,’ and suggesting his brain has gone soft from all that time in the tank:
Being in large part an homage to Hammer Horror, ‘The Brain of Morbius’ is well-produced, visually compelling, but also eminently riffable. The dim-witted assistant is named Condo, so obviously: “Condo not so bad. Condo just need renovation.” Maren, the leader of the uber-stylish Sisterhood of Karn, is constantly addressed in honorific fashion, so: “Stop calling me High One! I completed my 12-step program…” Tom Baker gets into the riffing spirit in the DVD commentary, remarking (as the Sisterhood imbibes their life-restoring elixir): “Away with the cellulite!” To which Liz Sladen responds: “Where do you come from?”
Some developments remind one of the Laura Nyro song “Poverty Train”:
You can see the walls roar,
See your brains on the floor;
Become God, become cripple,
Become funky and split–
Why was I born?
But more cheerful is this dead-on parody by the MST3K folks, which compares favourably with The Ink Spots: “Just as Though You Were Here” and Yoko Ono: “Yes, I’m Your Angel”:
Certainly by the late 70s/early 80s, the mad-doctor-with-dim-witted-assistant trope had been so overworked that it could flourish as outright comedy. The SCTV gang produced a series of short spoofs featuring Dr. Tongue and Bruno (played by John Candy and Eugene Levy respectively), such as “Dr. Tongue’s 3D House of Stewardesses”:
Quoting Dr. Tongue: “Well Bruno, it worked. I turned those stewardesses into zombies! Now they’ll obey our every command. The only problem is I think the experiment worked… too well.” (The zombified stewardesses proceed to bombard the Doctor with an annoying excess of drinks and pillows.)
Part of the genius of SCTV was that it often employed multiple levels of framing. The Dr. Tongue spoofs were supposedly real films aired on Monster Chiller Horror Theatre, hosted by Count Floyd (played by Joe Flaherty) — a newscaster who was forced to do double duty hosting the weekly horror film for kiddies, a common practice at small, local TV stations. (For more about Count Floyd and his role model Zacherle, see “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt!”)
Returning to Voodoo Man: If there are any advantages to my highlights reel, one is that it pretty much obliterates the plot (which was nothing to write home about). A second is that it only shows the spooky parts, not the filler scenes, which are meant to be lighthearted and witty, but seem rather boring.
It would be easy for a dyed-in-the-wool horror buff to juxtapose clips from Voodoo Man and Manos, showing the similarities between Toby and Torgo. Both have silly walks (apparently caused by knee problems), and both help administer the master’s harem of zombies. What’s most striking about Manos is that you’d think it’s a rip of Charles Manson and his ‘family,’ but it was actually filmed before the Tate-LaBianca murders which propelled Manson to nationwide prominence, turning him into a proxy for all that middle America feared about the hippie communes of the time.
Polygamous communes with freaked-out leaders
Despite vying with Plan 9 From Outer Space for the title of worst movie ever, Manos is culturally interesting because it hypes the devil-worshipping-polygamous-satanists trope to the nth degree — a trope present in milder form in Voodoo Man. As I hinted at in “Deprogramming Revisited Part 1,” the anti-cult movement which emerged in the late 60s/early 70s (and which still exists today) was obsessed with turning perceptions about every alternative spiritual movement counterclockwise, sliming them all with some variation on the Manson trope — no matter how ridiculously ill-fitting or inappropriate that trope might be. Those kidnapped and subjected to ‘deprogramming’ — whether their beliefs were Buddhist, Hindu, Christian or otherwise — often reported being held captive and forced to watch Charles Manson videos for hours on end, apparently as a crude ‘scared straight’ tactic. In order to prevent young people from embracing Buddhist chanting or Hindu meditation (or becoming Jesus freaks), alternative spirituality must portrayed as a cauldron of Mansonesque horrors.
Kidnapping type deprogrammings were an outgrowth of the rampant paranoia of the time, and a social control response (or backlash) to the new freedoms and cultural changes of the period. These changes did lead to instances of abuse; however, there was a moral panic about purported ‘cults,’ leading to an overreaction in which anything other than temple on Friday or church on Sunday was viewed on a par with voodoo, hypnosis, mind control, brainwashing, polygamy, and ritual murder. The more that a new generation struggled to find livable spiritual alternatives, the more the old guard applied repressive measures to force them to conform and ‘just act normal.’ I’ve come to feel that innovation and repression are two recurring cyclic themes in Western society.
Different types of social control
When aggressive majoritarians want to re-educate members of a minority to make them more palatable to the majority (or more compliant), just how far will they go? Interestingly, from the point of view of film studies as a means of cataloguing social control measures, I recently saw the 1999 film But I’m a Cheerleader, which came on one of Pluto.TV’s myriad of movie channels. This is a caustic parody of deprogramming — but not deprogramming of spiritual seekers. Rather, it’s about a young girl named Megan who exhibits some minor lesbian tendencies (like becoming a vegetarian!), so she’s spirited off to a wellness center called True Directions, and subjected to a strict programme of behaviour modification intended to make her embrace traditional gender roles, and hate gays and lesbians:
She is dressed in hot pink, and spends much of her time in a pink room with pink objects. She’s taught to care for a plastic infant and is assigned endless housecleaning duties. There’s a kind of aha moment where the kids are taken on a day trip to picket the home of a gay couple. They brandish signs saying ‘faggot’ and yell hate-filled epithets.
“Now what does this remind me of?” I thought to myself. Then I remembered that the point of anti-cult deprogramming or euphemistically named ‘exit counseling’ is not just to get people to adopt mainstream secular values, but to get them to actually become anti-cult activists themselves. In order to be pronounced cured of their presumed ‘cult illness,’ they must learn to hate groups to which they formerly belonged, and demonstrate a willingness to publicly attack and harass them. (Thus, deprogramming is, among other things, a type of ‘advocacy therapy’ in which one of the goals is to achieve social and political objectives, perhaps even to the detriment of the client.)
As for this requirement to actively hate a group to which one formerly belonged: It can be explained partly by the uglier side of human nature, but is also attributable to underlying theories embraced by those doing the deprogramming. Historically, social control agents — whether anti-communist, anti-cult, or anti-gay — have tended to hold the view that no person could freely choose or naturally adopt those beliefs and practices which said agents object to. Therefore, the individual must have been hypnotized, brainwashed, deceived, propagandized, or else is suffering from some ‘illness’ which (for purely compassionate reasons) must be cured by whatever ‘remedial treatment’ is deemed necessary by those objecting to the behaviour. But as C. S. Lewis powerfully illustrated in his 1945 novel That Hideous Strength (‘THS’):
Desert was always finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was.
The theme of no-holds-barred remedial treatment was graphically explored in A Clockwork Orange, the 1971 film version of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, and in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, the 1975 film version of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel. In the latter film, a troublesome petty criminal with a stubborn, rebellious streak is eventually given a prefrontal lobotomy. We can compare the film’s Nurse Ratched character (played by Louise Fletcher) with the Mary Brown character (played by Cathy Moriarty) in But I’m A Cheerleader:
Let’s also bring in the Doctor Who character Helen A (Sheila Hancock), from the 1988 story “The Happiness Patrol.” It’s about an (admittedly campy) totalitarian society where everyone is forced to be happy, or else risk being disappeared ‘for the good of the majority’:
We can see that Nurse Ratched has some degree of complexity, while both Mary Brown and Helen A are more in the nature of caricatures. The first video (exploring Nurse Ratched from various angles) is brilliant, but fails to make an explicit connection to the ‘therapeutic disguise’ of social control — the critique which has emerged (especially since the 1960s) that much of what passes for psychological theory and practice is tacitly rooted in questionable social and political assumptions, and has the effect of imposing oppressive normative standards on the diversity of human behaviour, feeling, and need. According to this critique, psychology as conventionally practiced may pathologize choices which are actually quite reasonable and rational — choices which individuals living in a free society are (in any event) allowed to make. (See especially ‘drapetomania,’ discussed in Part 2.)
There are many aspects of human behaviour which — whether we regard them as good, bad, or indifferent — we nonetheless attribute to personal beliefs, personal autonomy, and lifestyle choice. Yet, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, there has been an increasing tendency toward ‘medicalization’ of behaviour which some people find objectionable, even where that behaviour is not illegal, and is protected by the U.S. Constitution as amended by the Bill of Rights (or by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
Moreover, since beliefs may be viewed as leading to behaviour, in periods of moral panic mere beliefs can be sufficient to trigger social control measures. Merely ‘sympathizing’ with an unpopular political or spiritual movement (or lifestyle choice) may court retribution from the forces of social control. Such retribution may take the form of forced remedial treatment, justified under a medicalization model. Medicalization can thus be a convenient way to skirt the Bill of Rights. As Dena S. Davis puts it:
By changing the definition of the arena from political/legal to medical, anti-cult activists take advantage of a tendency already present in our society to strip people of their legal protections by claiming to be acting in their best interests. Our democracy, and the many fences erected by our legal structure to guard our individual freedoms, has been traditionally understood as a defense primarily against a government wishing to do us harm. … We are much more poorly defended against those who would [claim to] do us good.
In a 1958 essay published in the Observer, C. S. Lewis (who was a practicing Christian) commented:
One school of psychology regards my religion as a neurosis. If this neurosis ever becomes inconvenient to Government, what is to prevent my being subjected to a compulsory ‘cure’? It may be painful; treatments sometimes are. But it will be no use asking, ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ The Straightener will reply: ‘But, my dear fellow, no one’s blaming you. We no longer believe in retributive justice. We’re healing you.’ This would be no more than an extreme application of the political philosophy implicit in most modern communities.
His comment presages the rise of deprogramming (in the 1960s) as a form of behavior modification to which minority adherents would be subjected, with the rationale of ‘curing’ them of their supposed ‘cult illness,’ and instilling in them a kind of secular ‘objectivity’ sometimes euphemistically labeled ‘freedom of mind’ or ‘freedom from religion.’ In That Hideous Strength (1945), Lewis had already predicted what such confrontations might look like — as between an interrogator possessing an extreme secular, scientific, and interventionist mindset, and a subject who might still retain some degree of religious faith, even unconsciously:
Since the day and night of the outer world made no difference in Mark’s cell, he did not know whether it was minutes or hours later that he found himself once more awake, once more confronting Frost, and still fasting. The Professor came to ask if he had thought over their recent conversation.
…
The philosophy which Frost was expounding was by no means unfamiliar to him. He recognised it at once as the logical conclusion of thoughts which he had always hitherto accepted and which at this moment he found himself irrevocably rejecting. The knowledge that his own assumptions led to Frost’s position combined with what he saw in Frost’s face and what he had experienced in this very cell, effected a complete conversion. All the philosophers and evangelists in the world might not have done the job so neatly.“And that,” continued Frost, “is why a systematic training in objectivity must be given to you. Its purpose is to eliminate from your mind one by one the things you have hitherto regarded as grounds for action. It is like killing a nerve. That whole system of instinctive preferences, whatever ethical, aesthetic, or logical disguise they wear, is to be simply destroyed.”
“I get the idea,” said Mark, though with an inward reservation that his present instinctive desire to batter the Professor’s face into a jelly would take a good deal of destroying.
…
He understood the whole business now. Frost was not trying to make him insane: at least not in the sense Mark had hitherto given to the word “insanity”. Frost had meant what he said. To sit in the room was the first step towards what Frost called objectivity — the process whereby all specifically human reactions were killed in a man. … They were, in a sense, playing quite fair with him — offering him the very same initiation through which they themselves had passed and which had divided them from humanity, distending and dissipating Wither into a shapeless ruin while it condensed and sharpened Frost into the hard, bright, little needle that he now was.
…
The training in objectivity which took place … cannot be described fully. The reversal of natural inclination which Frost inculcated was not spectacular or dramatic, but the details would be unprintable and had, indeed, a kind of nursery fatuity about them which is best ignored. Often Mark felt that one good roar of coarse laughter would have blown away the whole atmosphere of the thing; but laughter was unhappily out of the question.
…
In the Objective Room, something like a crisis had developed between Mark and Professor Frost. As soon as they arrived there Mark saw that the table had been drawn back. On the floor lay a large crucifix, almost life size, a work of art in the Spanish tradition, ghastly and realistic. “We have half an hour to pursue our exercises,” said Frost looking at his watch. Then he instructed Mark to trample on it and insult it in other ways.Now whereas Jane had abandoned Christianity in early childhood, along with her belief in fairies and Santa Claus, Mark had never believed in it at all. At this moment, therefore, it crossed his mind for the very first time that there might conceivably be something in it. Frost who was watching him carefully knew perfectly well that this might be the result of the present experiment. He knew it for the very good reason that his own training … had, at one point, suggested the same odd idea to himself. But he had no choice. Whether he wished it or not this sort of thing was part of the initiation.
“But, look here,” said Mark.
“What is it?” said Frost. “Pray be quick. We have only a limited time at our disposal.”
“This,” said Mark, pointing with an undefined reluctance to the horrible white figure on the cross. “This is all surely a pure superstition.”
“Well?”
“Well, if so, what is there objective about stamping on the face? Isn’t it just as subjective to spit on a thing like this as to worship it? I mean — damn it all — if it’s only a bit of wood, why do anything about it?”
“That is superficial. If you had been brought up in a non-Christian society, you would not be asked to do this. Of course, it is a superstition; but it is that particular superstition which has pressed upon our society for a great many centuries. It can be experimentally shown that it still forms a dominant system in the subconscious of many individuals whose conscious thought appears to be wholly liberated. An explicit action in the reverse direction is therefore a necessary step towards complete objectivity. It is not a question for a priori discussion. We find it in practice that it cannot be dispensed with.”
Mark himself was surprised at the emotions he was undergoing. He did not regard the image with anything at all like a religious feeling. Most emphatically it did not belong to that idea of the Straight or Normal or Wholesome which had, for the last few days, been his support against what he now knew of the innermost circle at Belbury. The horrible vigour of its realism was, indeed, in its own way as remote from that Idea as anything else in the room. That was one source of his reluctance. To insult even a carved image of such agony seemed an abominable act. But it was not the only source. With the introduction of this Christian symbol the whole situation had somehow altered. The thing was becoming incalculable. His simple antithesis of the Normal and the Diseased had obviously failed to take something into account. Why was the crucifix there? Why were more than half the poison-pictures religious? He had the sense of new parties to the conflict — potential allies and enemies which he had not suspected before. “If I take a step in any direction,” he thought, “I may step over a precipice.” A donkey-like determination to plant hoofs and stay still at all costs arose in his mind.
“Pray make haste,” said Frost.
The quiet urgency of the voice, and the fact that he had so often obeyed it before, almost conquered him. He was on the verge of obeying, and getting the whole silly business over, when the defencelessness of the figure deterred him. The feeling was a very illogical one. Not because its hands were nailed and helpless, but because they were only made of wood and therefore even more helpless, because the thing, (for all its realism) was inanimate and could not in any way hit back, he paused. The unretaliating face of a doll — one of Myrtle’s dolls — which he had pulled to pieces in boyhood had affected him in the same way and the memory, even now, was tender to the touch.
“What are you waiting for, Mr. Studdock?” said Frost.
Mark was well aware of the rising danger. Obviously, if he disobeyed, his last chance of getting out of Belbury alive might be gone. Even of getting out of this room. The smothering sensation once again attacked him. He was himself, he felt, as helpless as the wooden Christ. As he thought this, he found himself looking at the crucifix in a new way — neither as a piece of wood nor a monument of superstition but as a bit of history. Christianity was nonsense, but one did not doubt that the man had lived and had been executed thus by the Belbury of those days. And that, as he suddenly saw, explained why this image, though not itself an image of the Straight or Normal, was yet in opposition to crooked Belbury. It was a picture of what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight — what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross.
“Do you intend to go on with the training or not?” said Frost. His eye was on the time. … He knew that he might be interrupted at any moment. … It seemed to him of the utmost importance to bring Mark as soon as possible beyond that point after which there is no return and the disciple’s allegiance both to the Macrobes and to the teacher who has initiated him becomes a matter of psychological, or even physical, necessity.
“Do you not hear what I am saying?” he asked Mark again.
Mark made no reply. He was thinking, and thinking hard because he knew, that if he stopped even for a moment, mere terror of death would take the decision out of his hands. Christianity was a fable. It would be ridiculous to die for a religion one did not believe. This Man himself, on that very cross, had discovered it to be a fable, and had died complaining that the God in whom he trusted had forsaken him — had, in fact, found the universe a cheat. But this raised a question that Mark had never thought of before. Was that the moment at which to turn against the Man? If the universe was a cheat, was that a good reason for joining its side? Supposing the Straight was utterly powerless, always and everywhere certain to be mocked, tortured, and finally killed by the Crooked, what then? Why not go down with the ship? He began to be frightened by the very fact that his fears seemed to have momentarily vanished. They had been a safeguard… they had prevented him, all his life, from making mad decisions like that which he was now making as he turned to Frost and said,
“It’s all bloody nonsense, and I’m damned if I do any such thing.”
When he said this he had no idea what might happen next. He did not know whether Frost would ring a bell or produce a revolver or renew his demands. In fact, Frost simply went on staring at him and he stared back. Then he saw that Frost was listening, and he began to listen himself. A moment later the door opened. The room seemed suddenly to be full of people — a man in a red gown (Mark did not instantly recognise the tramp) and the huge man in the black gown, and Wither.
– C. S. Lewis, extracts from That Hideous Strength, Chapters 14-15
Compare this fictional “step on a crucifix and become wholly liberated’ scenario with a non-apology apology offered by Carol Giambalvo, a real life deprogrammer turned exit counselor who also describes herself in Orwellian fashion as a ‘Thought Reform Consultant’:
The actual process of a deprogramming, as we see it, differs a great deal from voluntary exit counseling. Some of the ideas about cults and brainwashing prevalent at the time contributed to that process. It was believed that the hold of the brainwashing over the cognitive processes of a cult member needed to be broken — or ‘snapped’ as some termed it — by means that would shock or frighten the cultist into thinking again. For that reason in some cases cult leader’s [sic] pictures were burned or there were highly confrontational interactions between deprogrammers and cultist. What was often sought was an emotional response to the information, the shock, the fear, and the confrontation. There are horror stories — promoted most vehemently by the cults themselves — about restraint, beatings, and even rape. And we have to admit that we have met former members who have related to us their deprogramming experience — several of handcuffs, weapons wielded and sexual abuse. But thankfully, these are in the minority — and in our minds, never justified. Nevertheless, deprogramming helped to free many individuals held captive to destructive cults at a time when other alternatives did not seem viable.
To state what should be obvious: Acceptance, tolerance, and love are always viable responses to disagreeing with someone about their nonviolent religious choice. Yet, the social control mindset often includes elements of cultural, philosophical, and psychological imperialism: Our beliefs are just better, more right, and more normal than yours; therefore, we have the right to meddle forcibly in your life. We don’t want to use hateful methods, but after all, we must cure you. This mindset is reinforced by using terms like ‘cultist’ which dehumanize the other, reducing the human person to an object to be acted upon, rather than an individual whose free will and autonomous decision-making should be respected. Such dehumanization is more likely to occur (and be broadly endorsed) during periods of moral panic.
Killing with kindness
As absurd as is the character of Helen A (with her Thatcherite manner and determination to exterminate all ‘killjoys’), she represents the logical extreme of a state (or private entity) willing to use social control measures to force people to be happy in the manner it thinks they ought. She means well, yet the results are abominable.
The ‘kill with kindness’ trope appears more explicitly in New Who s06e10, “The Girl Who Waited.” There, Amy Pond is accidentally trapped and quarantined on the planet Apalapucia, where a deadly plague called Chen-7 has taken hold. Medical robots known as Handbots have been programmed to act as if one size fits all. They presume that any humanoid they encounter in the quarantine facility must be given an injection, not realizing that a) Amy doesn’t have the plague, and b) their cure would kill her. Just before they begin shooting hypodermic needles at her, they utter their standard catch-phrase: “This is a kindness.”
The scene is not a sop to anti-vaxxers, but rather a metaphor for social control, forced medication, and proffered ‘cures’ which the individual has no freedom to refuse. (See also The Imitation Game, a 2014 film about British mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptanalyst Alan Turing.)
In “Putting The Wind Up Richard Dawkins,” I discussed the New Who story “The Big Bang” (s05e13):
A very special little girl named Amelia Pond is growing up in an alternate time track — an Earth where there are no stars in the sky. But unlike most people, she remembers the original time track well enough to insist on painting the sky with stars, so of course a child psychologist has to be brought in to persuade her logically that “there’s no such thing as stars” — it’s “just a story.” With the camera mostly on Amelia, her mum chats with the psychologist and confesses her worst fears: “I just don’t want her growing up and joining one of those star cults. I don’t trust that Richard Dawkins!”
Amelia’s belief in stars has been medicalized. She must be deprogrammed for her own good; otherwise, she might end up joining one of those ‘star cults.’ The irony is delicious!
Exactly what beliefs or behaviour will be medicalized is a function of society’s attitudes at any given point in time, and who holds the political power to determine what’s allowed and what isn’t, what’s sane and what isn’t, what version of reality is deemed acceptable or verboten. This highly subjective (at times even arbitrary) element in deciding who gets targeted with social control measures is one reason that some critics of both anti-cult deprogramming and anti-gay conversion therapy consider both to be rooted in pseudoscience, and fundamentally violative of human rights.
Yet, society’s attitudes toward the two underlying groups can be markedly different. I’m still waiting for a film that shows how horrible and ridiculous it is to be subjected to anti-cult deprogramming. The closest I’ve seen is an episode of the old Lou Grant show (s1e18) titled “Sect.” First airing in 1978, this is a great honking example of a ‘contrarian narrative’ found smack in the middle of primetime TV. The essence of its message is that the Hare Krishnas are not fundamentally abusive, but deprogramming is; and the best way to resolve family conflicts over religious conversion is through better communication between parents and offspring.
I happen to be a spiritual seeker, but also a political liberal. Sometimes I have trouble explaining to my fellow liberals why it’s wrong to harass or forcibly deprogram minority spiritual adherents. If they watch But I’m A Cheerleader and realize “This is what deprogramming looks like!” maybe they would understand the issue better by analogy.
If you’re a liberal or progressive, you should ideally want to see an America where all the diverse groups which make up our society are free from harassment, not just the handful who happen to be political darlings of the left. But I’m A Cheerleader may be a heavy-handed piece of propaganda which might offend some viewers by its frankness and its garishness, but it does show why it’s wrong to target minorities with psyops intended to make them more like the majority.
I favour teaching tolerance as a universal principle, rather than working from a short list of approved minorities. The Amish, Hare Krishnas, and Scientologists have rights too, as do a wide range of other groups. If we fail to embrace human rights as a universal principle, then it will always devolve into rights for the people we like, and harassment of the people we don’t. This is a prescription for prolonged social unrest, as different groups fall in and out of favour according to the fashion of the times.
The Lewis passage from THS describing crucifix desecration ought be compared with this Human Rights Watch article discussing Koran desecration — a psychological technique used by the U.S. military to break down Muslim detainees and gain their compliance. The broader umbrella category is religious humiliation, whether used on POWs, or minority adherents subjected to deprogramming. See this 1977 Washington Post article describing some of the tactics confessed to by ‘Thought Reform Consultant’ Carol Giambalvo, including Krishna relic desecration:
A member of the Hare Krishna sect in Montgomery County charged in a lawsuit yesterday that she was kept prisoner for 33 days by “deprogrammers” who sought to rid her of her beliefs by depriving her of sleep and subjecting her to long, ritualized harangues against the sect.
Donna Seidenberg Bavis, 24, alleged that her captors, who were engaged by her mother for the deprogramming, stayed with her constantly throughout the 33 days, even accompanying her to the bathroom on occasion. She said she was kept in locked quarters and compelled to watch them burn Hare Krishna relics during a month of “terror and hysteria.”
Bavis, who returned to the sect in March after pretending to be successfully deprogrammed, then married another devotee, Edward Bavis. She had been confined by the deprogrammers under a “conservatorship,” a court-sanctioned form of guardianship usually applied to senile people who cannot manage their own affairs.
…
For four days, Andrew G. Stubbs, Paige Stetson of Rye, N.Y., a bodyguard known to Donna only as “Mark” and another deprogrammer known to her only as “Ellen” told her repeatedly that she could not escape and that she would he held captive “until she was ‘deprogrammed’ from her religious beliefs and associations ‘however long it takes,'” the lawsuit said.During this time, the long dress that she wore for religious reasons, was taken from her and replaced with dungarees; the picture of her fiance and a gold engagement bracelet from him were seized, among other items, and she was allegedly called a “whore,” a “slave,” a “bitch” and a “prostitute for her spiritual master.”
…
On March 1, Stubbs, Stetson, “Ellen” and another defendant, “Linda,” drove her to The Carriage House in Bradford, N.H., for four weeks of “rehabilitation.” … All doors and the telephone were locked, the complaint states, and Donna was kept “under constant surveillance.”She was allegedly compelled to listen to lectures about the New Testament, listen to tape recordings about Charles Manson (to whom her “deprogrammers” compared her Krishna leaders) and forced to write a letter … consenting to all restraints imposed upon her and authorizing her “deprogrammers” to capture her should she escape.
She also was forced to write a letter to Montgomery County Circuit Judge Richard Latham thanking him for “rescuing” her by granting the guardianship, [and] renouncing the sect and her engagement to Bavis.
On March 25, Donna was driven to Boston by another defendant, Joy Shores, the staff director at the Carriage House, for a conference with Jean Merritt, a psychiatric social worker, who questioned her about her religious beliefs and congratulated her on her “successful ‘deprogramming.'”
The individual elements of this case merit study for what they can reveal about techniques of social control, and the gap between the American ideal of religious freedom and the reality on the ground. People who choose a minority faith may, on occasion, be subjected to religious humiliation and personal abuse — not casually, as in insults from a stranger, but by organized groups acting as enforcers for mainstream values (either secular or Judeo-Christian). When minority targets of such abuses seek redress, they may encounter institutional prejudice based on hackneyed stereotypes and cultural scripts which portray them as the religious other, not like us, and therefore not deserving of constitutional protections or humane treatment. One such stereotype is the misguided notion that minority adherents must have been brainwashed, and therefore need to be forcibly unbrainwashed.
As Jesus is a central figure in the New Testament, Krishna is a central figure in the Bhagavad-Gita, sometimes called the ‘Hindu bible.’ Both Jesus and Krishna are objects of devotion within their respective traditions. Devotees of each often report similar experiences, such as feelings of great joy, and connection to a spiritual realm beyond our temporal realm. Worship of Krishna is a shared feature of many Hindu denominations. ISKCON would not be my personal choice of a spiritual path, but the deprogramming attempt on Bavis is shameful and unacceptable in a free society. Yet, as we will see in a later section on Sarah Chapman Bull: Claiming that a Westerner who adopts Hindu beliefs and practices is incompetent to manage her own affairs is hardly a new tactic. Rather, we are dealing with variations on the ‘hypnotized by swamis’ trope, which later morphed into the ‘cult brainwashing’ trope.
Reverse engineering
Although beyond the scope of this essay to fully elucidate, I want to add (much like bread crumbs to be followed) that there is a further connection between those psychological techniques practiced at military detention centers on detainees, and those practiced by deprogrammers/exit counselors on minority adherents. At the core of the problem is what investigative reporter Jane Mayer called ‘reverse engineering’ in her groundbreaking New Yorker series on military torture. (See ‘The Experiment.’) On the ACLU’s blog, Ghislaine Boulanger, Ph.D. — a founding member of Psychologists for an Ethical American Psychological Association — writes:
With the release of the CIA torture memos [in a U.S. Senate report] and the publication of Jane Mayer’s book, The Dark Side, the central role that psychologists played in reverse engineering the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program has been revealed. Originally developed to help American military personnel withstand torture, SERE techniques, adapted by psychologists, are now applied to detainees. Meanwhile, the presence of psychologists in interrogations lends a veneer of professional responsibility to the government’s illegal practices.
In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times titled ‘Mind games at Gitmo,’ Nancy Sherman — a philosophy professor at Georgetown University — further comments:
Many people have been outraged to learn from media reports that methods military psychologists have developed to train our own troops to resist torture (the so-called survival, evasion, resistance and escape methods taught at Ft. Bragg) have been ‘reverse engineered’ at Guantanamo Bay to create coercive, psychologically manipulative interrogation techniques for use against detainees. Plato warned long ago that a doctor’s skill, abstracted from good character and wisdom, is a neutral ability: It can be used to heal or to harm. So, too, the science of psychological trauma can also be the science of torture. How it is used is a matter of the virtue of the doctor.
Just as the SERE program was reverse engineered and used as a catalogue of torture techniques to be applied to prisoners, Robert Lifton’s theories about ‘thought reform’ have been reverse engineered and used as behavior modification techniques to be applied to minority adherents by deprogrammers/exit counselors. The position held by such anti-cult operatives has long been: We insist that those who make nonconformist choices which we don’t understand or agree with must have been brainwashed. Therefore, we need to apply forceful techniques (such as those described by Lifton) to unbrainwash them.
In both examples of reverse engineering, the motives are roughly the same: to gain the compliance of the targets and compel their defection. As with so many manifestations of social control, there are the pet theories, and a cornucopia of techniques to be applied to break down the individual. Those applying them say (in essence): We don’t want to engage in Koran desecration or Krishna relic desecration, but we must gain your cooperation. Once you’re on our side (which is the morally, scientifically, religiously, culturally and politically superior side — the side of freedom), you’ll thank us. Compare this with Prof. Frost in THS, who wants to ‘wholly liberate’ Mark Studdock’s ‘conscious thought’ by getting him to stamp upon a crucifix.
After the 9/11 attack, the so-called ‘War on Terror’ which ensued was an overreaction of the sort which typifies moral panics. The danger of terrorism was and is real, but the rush to embrace torture as a ‘necessary evil’ was an aberration which had the net effect of making America appear indistinguishable from her enemies. Later on (in Part 2), when we discuss the McCarthy Era and the Cold War, we will face a similar dilemma.
Because moral panics are broad social phenomena, in vain do we look to top political leaders to buck the trend. Then president George W. Bush was arguably responsible for greenlighting torture, while claiming falsely that torture was legal, and rationalizing its use as a means to “protect the American people.”
In a 2006 interview with Matt Lauer, Bush famously said: “This is people that want to come and kill your families, and the best way to protect you is to get information. And I’m confident the American people understand why we’ve done that.” But as more and more graphic images of detainees being tortured were seen by the general public, and the military’s own investigators detailed numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses,” some Americans began to question Bush era policies. It also emerged that many detainees had been swept up en masse, and were unlikely to have any information about terrorist plots. In perhaps the majority of cases, the people being tortured were not coming to ‘kill your families.’
Recall the quote from Nancy Sherman suggesting that if good character, wisdom, and virtue are lacking, the scientific method can easily be turned to torture. Her comment may be understood as a protest against the view that ‘the end justifies the means.’ Likewise, in Chapter 7 of THS, Lewis’s character Elwin Ransom notes:
“I am not allowed to be too prudent. I am not allowed to use desperate remedies until desperate diseases are really apparent. Otherwise we become just like our enemies — breaking all the rules whenever we imagine that it might possibly do some vague good to humanity in the remote future.”
Ransom is the Director or ‘Head’ of a small group which is opposing a scientific institute called the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (the N.I.C.E.), whose methods include torture. Their Head is literally a head taken from the body of a guillotined scientist, mounted on a bracket, and kept alive artificially. This is a variation on the Frankenstein trope which should interest us. For, in the standard trope (e.g. “The Brain of Morbius”), the mad scientist searches for (or assembles) a body to which the disembodied head or brain may be attached. Without a body, it’s considered incomplete. However, in this variation (which we might call the ‘Stapledon/Lewis variation’), scientists aren’t searching for a body for the head. Rather, they like the head better without a body, because they are posthumanists who eschew organic matter. As in Chapter XI of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, they favour bigger and bigger brains with smaller and smaller bodies — or better yet, no body at all — just the head (which is where Lewis takes it in THS). This may be viewed as a metaphor for the excesses of Scientism. See these links:
“C. S. Lewis: Science and Scientism”
https://www.lewissociety.org/scientism/
“C. S. Lewis and Contemporary Transhumanism”
https://evolutionnews.org/2020/08/c-s-lewis-and-contemporary-transhumanism/
Those who consider themselves Lewis scholars or fans of THS should read Chapter XI of the Stapledon work — titled “Man Remakes Himself” — and understand that THS is (in many respects) Lewis’s answer to it, his rip of posthumanism. Understood in this context, THS takes on additional meaning.
As we shall see, the ‘bigger brains with no body’ trope further subdivided with advances in computer technology. With the advent of ENIAC, dubbed a ‘giant electronic brain,’ posthumanists increasingly looked to artifical intelligence as a form of superior intelligence which would constitute a complete break from the organic. Their credulous belief in the potential superiority of inorganic intelligence often took a dark, dystopian turn in science fiction, leading to a trope which I call ‘Humans Serving Computers.’ We’ll explore this further when turning to the 1966 Doctor Who story ‘The War Machines.’ (End users of the Windows operating system may already be familiar with the feeling that they’re only there to serve the computer, keeping it supplied with the updates it demands. Or as the line goes in Little Shop of Horrors, “Feed me, Seymour!”)
In fact, a brief history of the brainwashing trope used to justify deprogramming runs thus: It began as the hypnosis trope in the 19th century, morphed into the communist brainwashing trope in the 1950s, and emerged as the cult brainwashing trope in the 1960s. What’s fascinating and fun about “The War Machines” is that there a giant computer called WOTAN has the power to ‘hypnotize’ or ‘brainwash’ humans who come in contact with it. (These terms are used explicitly in the dialogue.) WOTAN thus develops a cadre of high officials who serve it. They aid in its plot to turn the world into a scientific dictatorship. (The planned linkup of all the world’s computers is viewed by some as presaging the Internet age.)
In contemplating the examples of reverse engineering discussed above, I hope readers get the connection to the ‘kill with kindness’ trope exemplified by the scene from the Doctor Who story ‘The Girl Who Waited.’ Amy Pond doesn’t have the plague, but the Handbots insist on injecting her anyway. Likewise, minority spiritual adherents are not ‘brainwashed’ or ‘victims’ of ‘coercive persuasion’ or ‘thought reform.’ Rather, they’re religious nonconformists who’ve chosen to adopt different beliefs and practices than the majority; but they’re targeted for deprogramming by people who insist on trying to unbrainwash them, subjecting them to a litany of techniques that were supposedly used by Chinese and North Korean communists on POWs. This particular form of reverse engineering has prompted critics of the anti-cult movement to ask the perennial question Who’s brainwashing whom? An important takeaway from the ‘kill with kindness’ trope is that it does not seem a kindness to those targeted.
I shall end Part 1 here. When we begin Part 2, we’ll take a look at similarities between the ‘Cult Scare’ and the ‘Red Scare.’ This will form part of our investigation into the relationship between moral panics and social control. Of course, we’ll also have fun watching more clips from film and television.
Michael Howard
The views expressed are my own, and do not represent any other person or organization.
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Ethics and Spirituality 